Racist, imperialist, power-hungry megalomaniac. Why Roosevelt is not the model for Miliband or Labour

Theodore D. Roosevelt giving a speech on Long Island in 1917 (Photo: ALAMY)

From Monday's Daily Telegraph

Call him Eddy Roosevelt. When Ed Miliband declared his war on the big banks, Labour insiders let the media know that he was channelling the spirit of Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt – the US president who fought the monopolists and earned himself a spot on Mount Rushmore. And who wouldn’t want to model themselves on history’s toughest progressive? In 1912, Teddy visited Wisconsin to give a speech on behalf of his “Bull Moose” campaign for the presidency – and was greeted by an assassin who shot him in the chest. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the crowd, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!” Only when Roosevelt had finished his 80-minute-long talk did he calmly descend the stage and go to the nearest hospital.

So, superficially, Teddy is a great example to follow for a British politician seeking to blend idealism and hardy populism. But a little light reading beyond Wikipedia should tell Miliband’s advisers that the comparison isn’t quite as flattering as it might at first seem.

Those advisers probably belong to the international book club of Left-wingers, among whom the author du jour is Doris Kearns Goodwin (Barack Obama is a notable fan). Last year, Goodwin published a history of the Roosevelt years called The Bully Pulpit – an influential book that draws comparisons between early 20th-century America and today. Grinding poverty, a middle class feeling the pinch, giant monopolies crowding out the marketplace. Millions of Americans found a champion in Teddy, the scion of a wealthy family, a war hero and Republican president from 1901-09.

Back then, many Republicans embraced the reformism of the progressive movement. Roosevelt spoke of “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him”. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama, a Democrat, offered himself as the 21st-century Teddy, arguing that: “Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free licence to take whatever you want from whoever you can. It only works when there are rules of the road to ensure that competition is fair, open and honest.”

Obama was trying to say that because his interventionist policies were similar to a celebrated Republican’s, they couldn’t be that radical. As president, Teddy had backed legislation that introduced new standards to food production and the proper labelling of drugs. He also went to war against giant corporations, using “trust busting” to try to end monopolies and help smaller businesses compete in the market.

Sound familiar? Ed Miliband hates bigness in business, too: he wants to freeze the energy prices of the Big Six, and now to limit how much of the high street can be dominated by the big banks. Like Obama, he is using the comparison with Roosevelt to show that he is a centrist tapping into a tradition that seeks not revolution but reform. “The conservatives who want to leave everything to the free market are the real radicals,” he might say.

The problem with invoking Roosevelt is that he wasn’t motivated by the egalitarianism of the 21st century, but rather the prejudices common to the 19th. He saw life as a violent struggle between the strong and the weak. And, like many people of his time, he regarded this battle in racial terms. In 1905, he stated that whites were “the forward race”, who could raise the living standards of “the backward race[s]” through “industrial efficiency, political capacity and domestic morality”. There is a grim irony in Obama, the son of a Kenyan, quoting a man who once said that some Africans “are ape-like naked savages, who… prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves”. To protect civilisation from the wild things, Roosevelt urged whites to breed as much as possible – otherwise they risked “race suicide”. Whites who threatened the health of the stock were best isolated. In 1914, Roosevelt opined that “criminals should be sterilised and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them”.

Non-whites could even be an impediment to progress. Native Americans (“squalid savages”, a “weaker race”) lived on land that whites desperately wanted to exploit. Roosevelt joked: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th.” Under his watch, a large number of Native Americans were kicked off their territory to make way for developers and national parks.

At the heart of this ideology was a thirst for power, because the strong prove their strength by dominating others. Big government was their instrument of divine rule. Upon leaving office, Roosevelt reflected on all he had done and said: “I believe in power… The biggest [presidential] matters I managed without consultation with anyone, for when a matter is of capital importance, it is well to have it handled by one man only… I don’t think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands.”

None of this should suggest that Obama and Miliband share any of Roosevelt’s bigoted megalomania. On the contrary, while he sometimes sought power for its own sake, they do so with the ambition of reform. But they make a mistake when they imagine that there is some seamless progressive tradition from which they can draw: history is not a pure well to be tapped by contemporary politicians. And they see only the good in the progressive past, forgetting its many evils and errors. Trust busting, for example, does not always work, and very often is about one powerful industry using the government to break up an advantage held by another. Monopolies emerge naturally because a company is good at doing what it does; and they eventually collapse because smaller firms adapt faster to change. There is no innate benefit to building up the government in the way that Roosevelt, Obama and Miliband – all for very different reasons – have sought to do. Somewhere along the way, the market gets distorted and the individual loses power.

Some might say that whatever historical figure Miliband chose to model himself on is going to have unpalatable views. But that’s not true. From Roosevelt’s era, his advisers could have plucked social reformer Jane Addams, who provided child care, literacy and health services to the poor of Chicago; the African-American civil rights leader Booker T Washington, who tried to dissolve the colour bar with education; or Joe Hill, the union leader executed for a crime he didn’t commit. What links all of these people is that they were activists without government power: non-politicians. Perhaps the problem with men like Obama and Miliband is that they are politicians who like to read books about other politicians – of the type so eloquently written by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Such texts create the false narrative that history is shaped by elite statesmen, the kind of well-educated liberals who dominated party politics both then and today. In reality, it’s made by lots of little people getting angry about the status quo and forcing change.

More importantly, why doesn’t Miliband seek to compare himself to a British Labour reformer? What is wrong with Clement Attlee, Keir Hardie or even Nye Bevan? The sad truth is that Labour finds much of its own history too toxic, too socialist. It’s a legacy of Blairism, which was almost futurist in its contempt for the party’s heritage and its obsession with the promise of tomorrow. The problem, post-Blair, is that Labour is left searching for an authentic narrative – a historical story of where it has come from and what its values are. It is sad that in this nation of Diggers, Chartists, Quakers and Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Left has to look abroad for heroes. But that’s what happens when you divorce yourself from your own past.